by Page Turner
Bronson Eck was a clear case of this. A young man with an incredible mind for numbers, he struggled with sociopathy and a gambling addiction. His powerful family had been able to shield him from the consequences of his actions for many years, but once he murdered a Macomber over a high-stakes game of poker, that shield of protection had quickly dissipated.
There were simply some places too far out.
A Family member could get away with almost anything. But murdering a member of another Family? That was unforgivable.
Still, incarceration was enough. No one wanted to make a fuss. Or cause a media spectacle.
They all had their reputations to consider. Victim and victimizer alike. It made them all look bad when people paid too much negative attention to any of the Families.
The detectives left the prison about 20 minutes later. “You know,” Penny said. “We spent more time filling out forms than we did actually investigating.”
“That’s detective work for you,” Viv replied.
“Speak for yourself,” Penny said.
“I was,” Viv said.
Penny rolled her eyes, but it was a soft roll, the one you do when you genuinely like someone, but you’re not terribly impressed by what they just said.
“It’s too bad we couldn’t interview Bronson Eck today,” Penny said.
“I know, right?” Viv agreed.
Karen just sighed. That was frequently her way of adding her own opinion to the mix. Sometimes when she did this, Viv would call her a moody teenager, and there wasn’t much she could do to defend herself against the allegation, especially as she never went anywhere without her trusty hoodie. It was convenient, a bit like a shell to a turtle. If things got to be too much — which they often did in their line of work — she could retract for however long she wanted, hide under the massive hood.
True, turtles are physically incapable of leaving their shells, at least leaving their shells and surviving afterwards. Shells are built into their skeletons. If you took a turtle out of its shell, you’d basically be ripping its body in half.
To be fair to Karen, no one had really tested out what would happen if you took Karen’s favorite hoodie away from her permanently, although said hoodie was often spotted on the bathroom floor for brief periods of time when she was showering.
“Don’t worry, Karen,” Penny said, knowing as soon as the words left her mouth that it was a tall order. Karen’s anxiety seemed to thrive on such challenges. Rise up in response to them. Penny quickly added, “We’ll go through the proper channels and come back.”
The proper channels presented yet another bureaucratic maze, but hopefully Martin could throw his weight around or appeal to his own supervisors to do so and get them a sit-down. Martin was good like that.
As they drove away from the prison, they talked over the case. It seemed very likely that this crime had something to do with the Families. Maybe that’s why I’ve felt so troubled by this, Viv thought. Why I felt like it wasn’t a normal case. Because if it involves the Families, it isn’t.
“We have to be careful if it’s the Families we’re dealing with,” Penny said aloud. “They could end us just like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“Oh please,” Karen said. “They wouldn’t even have to snap. They’re rich enough to get someone else to snap for them.”
“And pay them to like it,” Viv said.
They laughed, but it was a joyless laugh, one that relieved tension and filled space but didn’t reflect true happiness.
“I really hope it’s not the Families,” Karen said. “But I don’t see anything else here that even comes close to explaining why someone would have wanted to come after those women. Pretty standard prisoner load, especially in the cellblocks they typically worked. According to their personnel file, they haven’t even worked in the prison system that long.”
“Oh?” Penny said. “Where’d they work before?”
“On a locked mental ward,” Karen said. “Funny coincidence there though.”
“Coincidence?” Viv said.
“Well, they worked at Nirvana Heights,” Karen said.
“Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time,” Penny said.
“And I’m glad, too,” Viv said. “It’s not something I want to talk about. Especially not now.”
Because they had pulled into the driveway in front of Viv’s mother’s house, finally making it to the visit they’d had to cancel on account of rushing to the scene of the crime.
And all three of them knew that Nirvana Heights would be the last thing in the world Viv’s mother would want to talk about.
“Wait here,” Viv told Penny and Karen as she left the car to enter her mother’s house. “I’ll come get you in a minute, I mean… if…”
Karen nodded. “We know.”
Penny said, “If the currents are right.”
Viv nodded, got up, and left the car.
After Viv had vanished into the house, Karen turned to Penny and said, “I think I have just enough range to keep an eye on her without the feelings coming back.”
Penny smiled. “I think you do,” she agreed.
“I’m going to stick close,” Karen said. “Just in case things go pear shaped.”
Penny nodded. “Don’t blame you. With that family, you’re pretty much guaranteed it’ll go pear shaped. You’re lucky when the pear doesn’t rot.”
Karen nodded.
“If Tenny weren’t a wax fruit, she’d have gone off thirty times by now,” Penny added.
Karen laughed and left the car, being careful to shut the door quietly. Treading as lightly as she could, she made her way to the front hallway, closing the door slowly behind her. Pressing herself against the mud room wall, she listened.
Love Me, Tender
Euphemia “Tender” Lee – or “Tenny” as her gentlemen callers had nicknamed her – was a lady of indeterminate age who was… well preserved, you might say. If you were being tactful.
If you weren’t being tactful, you’d say she looked like a Texas trophy wife. Skin improbably tanned. Tight facial expressions that never quite moved naturally through the full range, stopping just short, like a batter who pretends to swing but stops themselves before they inadvertently strike out.
Tenny dressed like a corporate lawyer except her necklines were always a few inches lower and her stilettos a few inches higher than would be tolerated in most boardrooms.
Not that she’d ever worked a day in her life.
Unless you counted raising her brat daughters and pretending whatever man she was talking to was the most fascinating person on the planet as work.
If you didn’t know her well, you’d assume that Tenny adored men. She spent enough time with them after all. Had been married nine times. Languished attention on them.
But her daughters knew differently. Having little respect for her daughters and little regard for what they might think of her, Tenny always spoke to them without a filter.
“Men have two purposes,” Tenny had told her daughter Viv when she was still in elementary school. “To disappoint us and to feed us.”
“All men?” Viv had asked when she was a little girl, wide eyed.
Tenny nodded. “The disappointments never get any better,” she continued. “But if you find a good man, the meals do.”
The same exact woman sat before Viv now. Tender Lee hadn’t aged a day in the time that Viv had aged 20. Well, not physically anyway. Mentally, her mother could be a bit here and there, especially over the last few years. But Tender Lee covered over the gaps in her memory with finesse. Confabulating with the best of them. Making up new details to explain any discrepancies.
She was good at making everything make sense, even when nothing did.
It had taken her daughters a while to notice her mental decline because Tenny had
always had a tenuous relationship with the truth. Some kind of psychiatric diagnosis, probably a personality disorder. She’d been treated in the past, even spent some time inpatient on a locked ward at Nirvana Heights, but wouldn’t tell anyone what for.
“Oh, you know,” she’d say, tossing her hair with a dramatic flourish as if expecting it to distract the questioner like a cascade of scintillating lights, “Stress. Exhaustion. Your standard risks of being a society lady.”
Typical of her. She kept her true cards close to her chest and flung false ones in every direction to distract onlookers, just like a magician performing a misdirection. Viv’s mother had always lied. The reasons why just changed over the years. It had always been about survival. In the beginning, survival hinged on the manipulation of others. These days, survival was about maintaining a coherent plotline even as she fell into emotional sinkholes that her deteriorating memory created. No matter the cost.
And yet… there was something different about her today. “Why, Mom,” Viv said. “You’re having a good day, aren’t you?”
Viv’s sister Love popped her head into the living room. “Of course she is, you twat, Mama has a good day every day.”
Tender nodded. “Your sister is right, Viv.”
“Why, of course I am,” Love said. “Every day’s a good day on God’s green earth when you’re alive, Mama. For you, for me, for everyone. Some of us are just more grateful than others.” Love shot Viv a dirty look.
Huddled out of sight in the mud room, Karen stifled a laugh. It was a real trip anytime she hung out with Viv’s family. The first time had been jarring as for some reason Viv didn’t have the thick Southern accent that her sister and mother spoke in.
Later she’d asked Viv if she’d trained herself out of it.
“No,” Viv had replied. “It just went away when we moved West.” She explained that her mother and her sister had kept theirs on purpose “to honor the General.”
“The General? General Lee?” Karen had asked. “Robert E. Lee?”
“Oh, Bobby?” Viv had said, doing a spot-on imitation of her mother, along with her mother’s affected giggle. “You know, honey, Bobby was family. Too bad about that nasty old Northern war. We really had them in the first half.”
It was amusing to Karen, knowing that the accent Love and Tender still used was on purpose. But not surprising.
Because so much about Viv’s mother was on purpose. Or, if one were so inclined, you could call her contrived.
It was a sharp contrast from Viv, who while definitely having some deep-seated control issues was about as genuine as they came. Love her or hate her, Viv was who she was. You never had to wonder where she stood.
Whereas her mother was more of a blank canvas. The real woman, had she ever truly existed in the first place, had been stripped away years ago, like a house undergoing a radical renovation. Everything had been knocked out, rebuilt, to satisfy each new occupants’ whims. Every new man’s desires.
And it was a mystery what original structures lay underneath – if anything.
Sometimes Viv thought there might be nothing there, nothing underneath her mother’s façade except for a box ready to be filled up with other people’s desires. She noted that was what her mother thought the ideal woman should be, after all – a blank space ready to accommodate everyone she met but especially rich eligible bachelors.
There was certainly no love in this woman. No commitment. Nor even any genuine affection. Her relationships with men were transactional, and she had always viewed her children not as fully-fledged individuals but as accomplishments, expensive possessions, or at best human pets.
Anything her children did that didn’t bring her prestige was of little interest to her. And anything they did that could potentially bring her shame or dishonor… well, that was just insufferable, wasn’t it?
Like having your dog shit on the floor while you had company over.
It was no good.
Couldn’t have the neighbors talking about her, could she? Unless that talk were bitter envy of how their own lives couldn’t measure up to how the Lees were living.
So it had come as little surprise to Viv that her mother hadn’t approved when Penny had moved in with Viv and started picking out new furniture. Nor was it surprising when Viv’s mother had approved even less when a few years later Karen joined them.
That just wasn’t how things were done. Who ever heard of a bunch of women living together? They should all have husbands. Children. Big diamond rings.
Not traipsing around who-knew-where as homicide detectives.
Homicide. Hardly a concern for a lady. Certainly not something Tenny Lee could brag about, that her daughter was stalking around dark alleys poking at dead bodies and guessing at how they ended up there.
Viv sat on the plastic-covered couch holding a chipped teacup in her hand, one of “the Regency dishes” that her mother practically worshipped but were clearly reproductions. This tea set had been through a tough time, brutalized by various moves from home to home, the inexorable U-Haul shuffle that had marked her adolescence as her mother met a new “soulmate” every other week.
Holding it in her hand, Viv felt herself relating to the little cup. She had been quite brutalized herself by all those moves, dented and dropped like the rest of her mother’s possessions. As she reflected on this and sipped tea, Viv braced herself for the talk that she got every time she visited. The one she knew would be coming.
But instead her mother said, “You know, I wasn’t so sure when these ladies moved in with you, Viv, but now I’m glad.”
Viv cocked her head. What was her mom on about? She had never said anything remotely like that ever before. She sounded… supportive.
Tenny Lee smiled broadly. “I had big dreams for you,” she said. “My dreams. Regular dreams.”
Viv winced. Alright, she thought. If that’s the worst of it, it’s not so bad. I know we’re different and that Mom centers everything around herself.
“But you’re chasing your own dreams now,” Tenny continued. “And that’s a good thing.”
Who was this woman? Viv wondered. This was completely unlike her mother.
“Thanks, Mom,” Viv said aloud. “I appreciate that.”
Tenny smiled broadly. Took a long lingering sip from her own teacup. “Besides,” Tenny said. “I wasn’t sure how someone like you would ever find someone decent. Now I know.”
Viv frowned. “What do you mean… someone like me?”
“Oh honey, you’re a smart girl,” Tenny replied. “I don’t have to spell it out for you.”
“Are you sure about that?” Viv said.
“Dear, you know what I mean,” Tenny said.
“I know what you could mean, Mom. That’s not the same thing.”
Her mother sighed. “Fine. You’ve always been stubborn. That’s the first thing, really. The first strike against you.”
“Stubborn?” Viv said. “Really? You think anyone’s stubborn that you can’t just lead around by the neck.”
“By the neck?” Tenny sad, smirking. “I suppose that’s one way to do. Not exactly the body part I usually have in mind.”
“Mom, that’s gross,” Viv said, suddenly thinking of other body parts her mother could have used as a leash in all her liaisons with wealthy men.
“Whatever could you be talking about?” her mother said, affecting a coquettish smile. Or trying to. Her face didn’t move these days as much as it used to, although Viv could tell when her mother was trying.
Viv frowned.
“Anyway,” Tenny continued. “You’re stubborn. You curse. Dress like a house painter. And a sloppy one at that. It’s like it’d kill you to show some skin or let anyone know there’s a body under there.”
Viv rolled her eyes.
“And your visions, honey…” Tenny said, letting her
voice trail off.
“What about my visions?” Viv said.
“Well, it’s not the kind of thing most people want to put up with. That most people understand. To be a tuey on top of the rest of that, well… let’s just say you aren’t an easy girl to set up with eligible bachelors.”
“Not that you didn’t try,” Viv remarked.
“Not that I didn’t try,” Tenny agreed. “As any good mother would.”
Viv snorted. The notion that her mother had been a good one was the funniest thing she’d heard in quite some time.
“Ungrateful, too. Which is a death knell to being a successful woman, to landing a good man, a good provider. That’s what most providers want, gratitude. A thank you. They want you to make them feel big and powerful. Indispensable.”
“I can take care of myself,” Viv said.
“In a fashion,” Tenny said. She didn’t elaborate.
Which was fine with Viv since Viv didn’t really want her to.
“Anyway,” Tenny continued, “If you can’t be grateful to your dear old mother, who literally gave you life, then how ever will you butter up a man the way that he needs? It’s no wonder you became a lesbian.”
Normally Viv didn’t mind that word – lesbian – nor even mind the strange notion that it was something she’d become and not something she’d always been, but when her mother said the word lesbian, with an uncomfortable emphasis and clear disdain, it sounded like a different word altogether.
It sounded like a slur. Viv winced.
“Was it difficult for me? Yes. Embarrassing? For sure. But you know, that part of you made sense. You weren’t quite right, couldn’t give men what they needed. So you found another woman who can’t give men what they need… well, it’s a bit tacky and weird, but that makes sense to me,” her mother continued. “And besides, Penny is a real lady. The kind of woman I’m surprised couldn’t make it work with men.”
